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deep down all those Pat Roach characters were big softies or at least that's what the rock crusher told me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manuscript_Found_in_Saragossa

Batu Sener is the new John Williams

This photo looks nearly like a baroque painting, from the colour palette of a dim-lit room, through the characters looking at something in the middle of the picture, down to more or less symbolic objects on the edges and in the background. It certainly would look well on a wall. Even just a basic filter shows which way this could go...

It is often said that people on the street will recognize a Williams tune from one of those movies. For how long though? I wonder how popular those elder blockbusters really are with younger audiences...

This segment sounds very much like TROS, down to the structural chaos. Just like with Tchaikovsky's late symphonies vs. his commercial music of the same period, I wonder whether it's sincere or ironical...

One could say that this time, Williams savvily didn't attach his name to a sinking ship.

Youtube autocompleted the John Williams track / scene I was going to type, even though I don't recall having ever listened to it on the platform. Maybe the algorithm is trying to shteer shinful youth towardsh shalvation....

Possibly, but how does that help if he has to go back to L.A. ro record in early June? He will be on the other side of the globe relatively to Italy.

I wonder if the La Scala event is also in danger Even if it's not cancelled outright, Williams will likely have to travel much less leisurely to Europe. Instead of flying to Chicago in advance traversing a few time zones, then resting on the West Coast, and finally completing the final leg of the journey with no hurry, he might now need to depart directly from L.A. and studio work.

Maybe I should have made it just about At World's End vs The Sea Hawk – the comparison that actually sparked this question.

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Which contemporary composers would you compare the pre-Jaws Williams to, in terms of relative standing in the industry?

Imagine that character pulling a lightsaber to some random music and then everybody saying 'it's a lightsaber'. It would fall completely flat, even for the dummies. Where would Star Wars be without JW?

Williams was 43 at Jaws and 45 at Star Wars. Steiner's breakthrough was King Kong (1933) when the composer was 45. Bruckner got famous at the age of 53, after a somewhat belated premiere of his 3rd symphony. Shore was 54 when he begun to work on LOTR. Most remarkable to me is that Williams didn't just write a few works (even big ones) at such an age, but instead started a 40+ years-long spree of masterpieces in the genre.

1977's Star Wars will officially belong to the first half of his life. By the time of the release of Indy 5 (2023), it will belong to the first third of his scoring career (1954-1977, 1978-2000, 2001-2023).

Congrats! I bet many composers would wish to have their music accompany a show like that Would you care to share what styles were you thinking about while coming up with this? I am hearing some good ol' orientalism like Borodin/Saint-Saens/Nielsen, but also some marks of Williams' Indy and prequel music. Funnily enough Williams would write such music for rather menacing imagery such as a dangerous chase or a march of bad guys, so the display of pyrotechnics comes across as more on the wild / dangerous side - which I totally dig!

Yes, I can listen to Herrmann, Lutosławski, tonal Schoenberg, Bruckner, Wagner, and other composers... of the past, and some of their best works are quite satisfying. The sort of synthesis of some of their best qualities that Williams did, however, seems... sadly rather unique to him. I don't hear it often (rarely ever) with composers younger than Williams. Exception: I've recently been to a premiere of a new staging of Verdi's Don Carlos, which included a rather Stravinskian prelude written by some contemporary composer. I really enjoyed it, and when I had the opportunity to hear that staging at a later point, I was more excited about the prelude than about any of Verdi's original music.

Maybe 25 years from now a straight-to-desk-drawer work will surface, where Williams had some fun in the style of Haydn. Let's not count that out!

While I'm not a fan of chamber music, in a somewhat similar vein I generally prefer piano reductions of orchestral works to dedicated solo piano repertoire.

In one of the Legacy of John Williams episodes it was said that Williams's music can have a spoiling effect on a listener: if one wants to hear more music like that of JW, one has to give up on something: either harmony has to get more conservative, or orchestration get less interesting, or the melodic line less captivating... or the music have less variety. Do you feel this dilemma as well when searching for comparable music to listen to? I certainly do, and whenever I listen to recent film scores, or recent concert music, I feel like I have to give up on just about every item. In the best case the music is nice to listen to once, but it doesn't really make me wish to hear it again.

only de iure

One could say that because of those woodwind absentees, Nimbus 2000 hasn't been played by the Berliner Philharmoniker at all